Luke Rockhold is open to the idea of fighting Sean Strickland next.
Rockhold hasn’t fought since being knocked out by Jan Blachowicz in July 2019. The former UFC middleweight champion flirted with the idea of retirement before re-committing himself to MMA.
The 36-year-old has found it tough to get matched up for his comeback fight. Rockhold recently revealed that Jack Hermansson, Khamzat Chimaev, Kevin Holland, and Uriah Hall all refused to fight him for one reason or another.
On Tuesday, Dana White claimed he is trying to make a fight between Rockhold and Sean Strickland, who is fresh of his career-best win over Hall at UFC Vegas 33.
Rockhold told Submission Radio he’s down to fight Strickland.
“I haven’t heard any dates or anything like that, but that is something they’re interested in,” Rockhold said. “And yeah, let’s do it. I mean, he’s not the most… he took a ranking, he did his thing, but he doesn’t help himself in anyway, shape or form with his style and his performance on mics.”
Strickland was previously mentioned as a potential comeback opponent for Rockhold who turned down the fight.
Now that Strickland is ranked in the middleweight top 10 the former champion finds the match-up more interesting.
“They offered me Sean actually a while back and I just wasn’t interested cause he’s just a fucking nobody,” Rockhold said. “It wasn’t the fight I wanted. It didn’t make any sense, no one knew of him, and I didn’t give two fucks about him. And now it’s like Dana’s trying to piss me off with it. And now he’s obviously been out there, he beat Uriah Hall, he looked decent and he took a ranking. So, there’s something to work with I guess now. And everybody else, everybody else is really… they offered it to “They offered me Sean actually a while back, a while back. And I just wasn’t interested cause he’s just a fucking nobody. It wasn’t the fight I wanted. It didn’t make any sense, no one knew of him, and I didn’t give two fucks about him. And now it’s like Dana’s trying to piss me off with it. And now he’s obviously been out there, he beat Uriah Hall, he looked decent and he took a ranking. So, there’s something to work with I guess now. And everybody else, everybody else is really… they offered it to Uriah. Uriah chose Strickland instead of me. They offered the Chimaev fight. Obviously that didn’t come to be. I liked that too, that was exciting. That kind of got me up. I don’t know, this is what we have, and there were some other fights they kind of dicked around with. So, this is seemingly gonna happen. We just gotta get a good fight date and something that’s fucken sexy and timely.”
Do you want to see Luke Rockhold vs. Sean Strickland?
Former UFC middleweight champion Luke Rockhold could make his highly-anticipated return to the octagon sooner rather than later after it was reported that he has been offered a bout with Top-10 middleweight contender Sean Strickland for a later date. Rockhold has been on the sidelines for a while since announcing his intentions to not only […]
It wouldn’t be right if we didn’t have some controversial comments from a UFC fighter — especially Sean Strickland. Strickland is coming off an impressive unanimous decision win over Uriah Hall in their UFC Vegas 33 headliner last night. As a result, Strickland made it five wins in a row and will undoubtedly be targeting […]